Posts by PerlyKing

Be careful where you install software, and who installs it

Re: Linux Bros'

Linux has a GUI? ;-p

Post-quantum crypto cracked in an hour with one core of an ancient Xeon

Re: keep banging the rocks together.

Thumbs up for the HHGTTG reference :-D

The perfect crime – undone by the perfect email backups

Re: Logs

We're only getting the stories about the people who got caught....

Apple's grip on iOS browser engines disallowed under latest draft EU rules

The irony

Can anyone else remember the early days of iPhones, when Apple resisted publishing an SDK and said that developers should do everything in Web apps?

The month I worked for DEADHEAD: Yes, that was their job title

Re: art copies real life

In the places where I've worked recently none of the lowly Managers have had secretaries (or even PAs). You'd have to be Head of Something or Other to qualify for human help.

When product names go bad: Microsoft's Raymond Chen on the cringe behind WinCE

The BASTARD system

My boss tried to get our new system named the Buy-sell And Sell-buy Transaction And Reporting Database, so that support calls would be along the lines of "The BASTARD system's gone down again!" :-)

Someone higher up with no sense of humour nixed the idea :-(

CompSci boffins claim they can recreate missing lines in log files

Re: did the events actually take place or not

You're making it sound like the perfect application of this would be in quantum computing.

Web3: The next generation of the web is here… apparently

Re: Web 0.1

Shhh, you'll attract jake!

Intel's mystery Linux muckabout is a dangerous ploy at a dangerous time

Footnote

For our overseas listeners, I think that the good Doctor was referring to the closing lines of that antidote to panel shows, BBC Radio Four's "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue", which is traditionally closed by the host using an expression like that. A few of them are collected here, from which I extract this gem:

"As the rogue purple underpants of time begin their assault on the whites-only wash cycle of destiny, and the twin buttocks of fate are sucked into the malfunctioning chemical toilet of eternity..."

... I see that it's the end of the show. Goodbye!

Actual metal being welded in support of the UK's first orbital 'launch platform'

Re: what's the planning situation regarding launch sites atm?

According to the Orbex press release:

Space Hub Sutherland is the world’s first carbon neutral spaceport and the only spaceport in the UK to have received full planning permission. Construction of the spaceport is due to begin early in 2022 ahead of the first expected launch of Orbex Prime later in the year.

I'm guessing that what Kinloss has to offer is acres of unused ex-RAF base with plenty of concrete hard standing. It may be easier to get planning permission to do dangerous, noisy things there than most other places.

Re: the launch site is probably in the arse end of nowhere

So Kinloss is pretty handy for the launch site ;-)

Source: I grew up there.

How to destroy expensive test kit: What does that button do?

Re: Touch is enough

Getting back to the less rugged world of corporate IT, in the early nineties we had an HP-UX box in for assessment as a possible replacement for Sun kit. Don't ask me why it was running with the case off, but one of the senior members of the team wandered up, asked "what's this bit?" and plucked something off the motherboard. The screen went black and all eyes were on him =-O Fortunately after turning the power off, replacing the part and screwing the case on firmly it started up again flawlessly.

How do you call support when the telephones go TITSUP*?

Re: Timesheets

My current place not only wants us to book time in 15 minute increments so that they can "accurately" track what we've been up to, they also insist that we book the whole week's time by Thursday evening, and the month's time about a week before the end of the month. And we can book a maximum of eight hours a day.

The rocky road to better Linux software installation: Containers, containers, containers

Re: Not Invented Here

I always understood it to mean, "I'm not going to use X because it was Not Invented Here. I'll write my own instead."

Lenovo ThinkPad T14s: Impressively average, which is how corporate buyers like it

Re: Get T14 instead

Because I'm too lazy to look it up: is the regular T14 available with AMD processors?

Re: Likely removable

Sadly, Lenovo stuck a "DO NOT REMOVE" sticker over one of the screws in the base so we were unable to poke around the internals. The company makes much of the fact that customers can opt to retain the SSD during servicing so it's likely removable.

You could always download the service manual from Lenovo support. I can't go digging around for the URL just now, but it's not that hard to find.

Spoiler: the SSD is removable.

Re: or just slap linux on it

Linux isn't necessarily a cure-all. I run Kubuntu on a Lenovo P1 (Gen1, so not strictly approved for Linux) and every so often a BIOS update borks the WiFi or loses the Linux boot option, or both. The boot option is fairly easy to recover, but if the WiFi goes it takes another BIOS update to fix it (this is the official line from Lenovo support). Which is when the Ethernet dongle comes into its own, although I'd prefer a normal Ethernet plug.

But most of the time it's great :-)

A lightbulb moment comes too late to save a mainframe engineer's blushes

Re: I had a somewhat similar problem

I had a somewhat similar problem in a non-IT setting, which I may have related here before.

Riding to work on a new (to me) motorbike I stopped at a red light and the bike died. No sign of life, not even the click of a dying battery when I tried to start it up. After a few minutes of checking what I could, I called the AA. Eventually a man showed up in a little van, checked the things I'd already checked, couldn't start it. And didn't have the equipment to move a bike, so he called another man in a bigger van. The second AA man checked the things we'd already checked, couldn't start it, put the bike on his trailer and took me to the mechanic of my choice. As soon as the bike was unloaded, said mechanic looked at the bike, turned the kill switch back on and the bike started first time X-(

For those not in the know, motorbikes tend to have a big red kill switch on the handlebars to turn off the electrics in case of an accident. The one on this bike had a fairly light action and was in just the right position to catch on the wing mirror of a van as I squeezed past it in stationary traffic.

A tiny island nation has put the rights to .tv up for grabs – but what’s this? Problematic contract clauses? Again?

Re: registering a .au domain was so quaint

An Australian friend of mine around that time was gutted at the move to .au from .oz.

Amazon tells folks it will stop accepting UK Visa credit cards via weird empty email

Re: I would like to support anyone that is "not Amazon", but how can I if their site is broken?

You could start by letting them know their site is broken, and how much business they've lost because of it.

Assuming you can find a way to actually get a message through to them, which a lot of web sites seem to actively discourage....

Reg scribe spends 80 hours in actual metaverse … and plans to keep visiting

Balanced turns

I'm interested in how left-right tilting can simulate cornering. I'm not much of a cyclist, but I'd expect turning to be balanced, with the net acceleration vector pointing straight through the frame of the bike, making you feel heavier rather than feel like you're leaning over. Or is it more complicated than that?

FYI: If the latest Windows 11 really wants to use Edge, it will use Edge no matter what

Re: Sym link?

It sounds like that might work if you're opening links inside the browser, but if the link is handled by Windows it goes to Edge no matter what. For example links in emails or PDF documents.

Rolls-Royce set for funding fillip to build nuclear power stations based on small modular reactor technology

Re: Maybe if the company director's are made personally liable

I think AC is not familiar with the concept of the limited liability company.

Re: ITER in 2025

ITER is experimental, not a commercial power station.

According to their FAQ page (Section "FUSION AS A SUSTAINABLE ENERGY SOURCE", question 3 "If successful, when would fusion be able to add power to the grid?") they're expecting fusion to contribute power to the grid by 2050, "a goal that it considers ambitious, yet realistic" - 25 years after first plasma and very nearly 30 years from now.

Say what you see: Four-letter fun on a late-night support call

Re: Red (Dwarf) alert

Rimmer: Step up to red alert.

Kryten: Sir, are you absolutely sure? It does mean changing the bulb.

Re: And repeat...

I did overnight support when I was in a Knowledge Management group, and all our servers had "km" in the name. When the automated text-to-speech called us it always converted that to "kilometre" so the server name would come through as "el oh en kilometre pee ess one two three" or whatever :-)

Re: Screenshots

I don't really care what format a screenshot arrives in, I just hate it when I ask for a message ID (which might contain a UUID) and get sent a screenshot of it instead of text that I can copy & paste!

Re: an American James Bond

ITYM "Jimmy Bond".

Google's 'Be Evil' business transformation is complete: Time for the end game

Re: timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes

To digress a little, I had to learn some Latin at secondary school (or at least attend the classes...). Early on, the teacher asked us whether we knew any Latin phrases. We started with the usual "et cetera", "id est" and maybe a couple more. Until it was my turn, and I trotted out "Timeo danaos et dona ferentes" (which is what Asterix said in Asterix the Legionary :-D). After a slightly stunned silence, the teacher took me apart on my somewhat loose translation. A bit like the centurion in The Life of Brian except that my Latin was never that good.

Windows Subsystem for Android: What's the point?

Re: A 4GB laptop upgrade is around £20

For Mac users, add a zero ;-)

Boeing's Starliner capsule corroded due to high humidity levels, NASA explains, and the spaceship won't fly this year

Remind me...

Wasn't Boeing selected at least in part due to its long history of building launch vehicles? Many of which launched from Florida?

Double facepalm - when one facepalm is just not enough.

Shatner breaks the age barrier, goes where no nonagenarian has gone before with Blue Origin rocket trip

Superlative?

I may need to have my ears checked, but I'm sure that when this was mentioned on Radio 4 this morning the newsreader referred to Mr Shatner as "the largest astronaut"!

The planet survived six hours without Facebook. Let's make it longer next time

Re: Clubs and societies

More worryingly, my Parish Council have decided to set up a Facebook page. They've given assurances that important stuff will be posted on their own web site as well, but it doesn't feel like a good day for local democracy :-(

Config cockup leaves Reg reader reaching for the phone

Re: e er what's the difference

I'm thinking about third-party tools like supervisord. I'll alias "supervisorctl status" but not "supervisorctl stop".

Re: e er what's the difference

Personally I don't create short aliases for destructive commands. Too risky around my fat fingers!

Re: commit confirmed 300 - what do you mean it will revert in 3 hours!

These will be the new decimal hours then?

Facebook rendered spineless by buggy audit code that missed catastrophic network config error

Re: Some people

If I were being really picky, I would say that you were affected inasmuch as you are aware of the outage and it appears to have somewhat amused you ;-)

But my point was that Facebook's initial response (on Twitter? I may die laughing!) was to say that "some people" had been affected. In the Good Old Days "some people" would imply a small minority, but these days it has become a stock PR phrase which abuses the old usage to trick people into inferring that only a small number of people were involved, while being technically true. Yesterday's outage affected probably 100% of Facebook's data providers and while this is "some" it is also, what, two billion people? It takes the PR usage of "some people" to a whole new level!

Some people

Are they still saying that "some people" were affected? Technically accurate but totally misleading!

Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram deplatform themselves: Services down globally

Re: We could try to shame them

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha *snort* *wipes tear from eye*

Re: Only old people use facebook

A few whippersnappers use Insta and even WhatsApp, or so I'm told.

What if Chrome broke features of the web and Google forgot to tell anyone? Oh wait, that's exactly what happened

Re: NoScript lists 20-30 sites

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... uMatrix has warned me of having blocked "999+" scripts on some relatively simple looking pages! Which appear to work quite well without the blocked scripts, at least from my point of view.

Maker of ATM bombing tutorials blew himself up – Euro cops

Re: Ignition!

Seconded! Most of the chemistry went over my head, but it's an entertaining read all the same. It's out there somewhere on the Internet for free, and it's recently been reprinted.

I can't recall the exact wording, but one of the oxidisers that was investigated was "hypergolic with fuels, sand, asbestos and lab assistants"!

Got enterprise workstations and hope to run Windows 11? Survey says: You lose. Over half the gear's not fit for it

What's the rush?

My current client has only just switched over to Win10, I wouldn't expect another change for at least 2-3 years.

Metro Bank techies placed at risk of redundancy, severance terms criticised

Fire and hire

Sounds like the old "new contract, fewer benefits" scam - why not transfer at least some people instead of effectively firing and rehiring them?

Off yer bike: Apple warns motorcycles could shake iPhone cameras out of focus forever

Re: Waterproof bike jacket

Now I'm interested - what bike jacket is still waterproof after 20 years? Over time I've come to think that an old friend of mine was right when he said a waterproof jacket costs about £100 per year - either one new £100 jacket every year or more expensive ones for more years :-)

We're all at sea: Navigation Royal Navy style – with plenty of IT but no GPS

Re: Glider units

Not if you're using CAA aeronautical charts, but other maps are available.

All the altimeters I've seen in the UK have been calibrated in feet, and all discussions of height/altitude have always been in feet.

If I were flying to another airstrip (which is unlikely as my PPL has long since expired ;-) I would request QFE (local air pressure in millibars) and set my altimeter to read height above ground at that location.

Re: Everybody Down!

Oooh, nasty!

At last a good use for this icon :-D --->

Re: Glider units

Glider pilots in the UK still use feet for altitude, at least up until last weekend. But they do use km for task distances.

The Register speaks to one of the designers behind the latest Lego Ideas marvel: A clockwork solar system

Re: Detailing

Either way, hopefully (?) they'll re-attach California to North America :-)

It's the end of the world as we know it, and we should feel fine

Re: Oric owners

Owners? ;-)

I once saw a Jupiter Ace (owned by an Afficianado Ace?) but I don't think I ever saw an Oric in the wild.

RIP Sir Clive.